In general, web application firewalls (“WAF's”) are important components of a network defense solution. However, conventional enterprise WAF's are sold as appliances and they do not scale very well. An example company might have over 4,000 applications that each require configuration considerations—so by the time custom rules are added to accommodate the different configuration considerations of the group of applications, the traditional WAF becomes very, very slow. This ultimately affects end-user performance in a negative manner. Because of this, companies typically do not use WAF's to protect vulnerable applications or apps, but instead use WAF's to merely monitor network traffic. Put another way, a company's application-based surface is extremely wide. A single WAF solution would create significant latency and a potentially high maintenance burden.
Hence, there is a need for more robust and scalable solutions for implementing firewall functionalities, and, more particularly, to methods, systems, and apparatuses for implementing high availability (“HA”) web application firewall (“WAF”) functionalities.